And now, following the news that the Detroit Rap God has been announced to headline two huge UK festivals this August in the form of Reading & Leeds 2017, chatter about a potential new album dropping soon has reached fever pitch:

When Em dropped ‘Campaign Speech’ back in October of 2016, he also confirmed that the follow-up to 2013’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2 was in the pipeline, tweeting: “Don’t worry I’m working on an album!”

Since then, the self-proclaimed “Chuck Norris with a thesaurus” has been pretty quiet on the subject of his mysterious new LP, but he’s still stayed high our radar, recently delivering his most high-profile guest verse in years on the Big Sean track ‘No Favours’, which hit #22 on the Billboard charts to become his highest charting feat. since Dr Dre‘s I Need A Doctor in 2011.

And now, of course, we have him breaking his live hiatus by announcing two monster concerts; both headlining gigs at international mega-festivals, which he last played in the lead-up to dropping his most recent LP in 2013.

I don’t think we need to tell you how rare it is for an artist who isn’t an old school legacy act to be booked to headline festivals as huge as Reading & Leeds without having any new material to promote, so yeah. Doing the math (new track + new album announcement + high-profile collab + huge new live shows), Marshall Mathers is definitely building up to something. And it seems pretty damn likely that we can expect more new material — if not a whole new album — from Eminem to drop before August.